The drop in AdWord clicks over the past two months has created a bump Google's ongoing success. But not to worry, CEO Eric Schmidt told Business Week, people will eventually pay more for the better quality clicks.

There has been a lot of press about this lately. I think "Google's Gamble" as Business Week called it may be expecting too much. If the cost of their clicks continues to increase through their minimum bid and Quality Score push people may start using Yahoo and Microsoft first.

While their popularity will continue to give them the high volume of traffic, if Yahoo and Microsoft offer lower CPA (cost per acquisition) then the strategy of starting with Google because of that could be changed to get the lower costing conversions first and then test the successful ones over at Google.

If this happens then the edge Google has could drop. It is one thing to be the popular search engine for users, but if they lose their position as the popular engine for advertisers then they are almost back to the days when they had no idea how to monetize their engine.

Obviously in some cases where there is a big enough margin in what is being marketed advertisers will buy the more expensive clicks. But in the case of companies selling small margin items such a move will make it difficult.

Apart from the Quality Score influence, this move suggests Google is using information they are getting from Google Analytics to determine if people will pay more. This is a dangerous step for a number of reasons - one, the privacy issues could be a problems and stop this and two, many people using GA may not be doing so effectively, measuring the wrong thing and thus giving Google information that they use but is not real.

We will all have to wait and see if their hopes are founded.

When Google raised concerns over a possible Microsoft-Yahoo merger, it may have just been the pot calling the kettle black. According to new stats released by Attributor, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick gives them a whopping 69% of the online advertising market share. This comes in the wake of news that Google saw 59.2 percent of all US searches in February.

Furthermore, DoubleClick has 48% share of sites with 1 million unique visitors per month, while Google enjoys a whopping 71.38% share of sites with less than 100,000 unique visitors per month.

MSN has a lot of work to do if it wants to catch Google, as Steve Ballmer has declared in recent months. Currently, they only have 9.86% of the total market share. Even adding Yahoo, with an 11.54% market share, they will only come in at 21.4%.

Attributor also shared telling statistics for content distribution. For every article Attributor tracks, there are an average of 20 copies published. 57% of copies do not contain links back to the author, and 64% of copies have ads on them. Most copies are published on sites with less than 1 million unique visitors.

Attributor analyzed 68 million domains for their ad-server crawls and compared it with unique user data from Compete.com.

Ever since Microsoft made its initial 44 billion bid on Yahoo several weeks ago the venerable search engine has desperately tried to rebuff the software giant s advances. From behind-the-scenes bargaining with other companies to announcements that the deal vastly underrates Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has been working to keep his company from being purchased by the monolithic monopolist. Read on for his latest move....
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Purported interest in Digg by Google and Microsoft made for a hot rumor earlier, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson said rumors is all they were.

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Purported interest in Digg by Google and Microsoft made for a hot rumor earlier, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson said rumors is all they were. read more

Purported interest in Digg by Google and Microsoft made for a hot rumor earlier, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson said rumors is all they were. read more

Yesterday at TechFest, Microsoft Research unveiled three projects designed to enhance a user's search experience. Two projects, SearchTogether and CoSearch, are aimed at collaborative search while SearchBar assists the individual searcher.

SearchTogether is a free Internet Explorer plugin that allows groups of people searching on multiple computers in different countries to collaborate their searches. The plugin will be available for download later this Spring and installs a sidebar on the IE web browser. SearchTogether’s features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.

CoSearch enables collaborative search while users are gathered around a single computer. This is facilitated by the use of multiple mice or cell phones. For example, a person might use their cell phone to maneuver a cursor on the screen and transfer data to their phone, while another user may use a mouse to follow links on the same page at the same time.

Searchbar is an advanced search history tool that operates as a sidebar in a user’s web browser. Users can save searches in order to return to them later and pick up where they left off. SearchBar organizes the searches in a hierarchical tree format. Users can write notes to themselves to remind them of future searches or any other information they wish to remember about their search queries.

Microsoft's projects are comparable to recent efforts by Google and social media startups to personalize and socialize search. But Microsoft could take the lead on such efforts because these projects offer users increased control of their own research efforts. With the ability to easily keep personal accounts of search queries and share and receive results from people they know, instead of being purely subject to algorithms and the opinions of a broad audience.